Team Fortress 2 countdown clock appears, update assumed imminent

The Team Fortress 2 blog has updated with a brief and mysterious message . It leads to a countdown page, called "suspense.html", ticking down to... something. Whatever that something is, it'll happen in just over 13 hours, at 1am BST.

Those are the facts, all that remain now are questions. Questions like, what do Valve have planned? Why are Reddit's TF2 community suddenly obsessed by bread? And how are Valve managing to reignite my interest in TF2 for the first time in almost a year?

Whatever is planned when the countdown hits zero, I doubt it'll be the update just yet. The filename of the countdown's test card GIF is "day0_testcard", which suggests multiple days of teasers—something that was standard back in TF2's update-heavy heyday.

Valve have previously hinted at the contents of future updates. Back in April, they posted some concept art of a Moonbase, alongside the sentence, "we're also working on a Moonbase". It's a pretty strong hint that they might be working on a Moonbase.

Then there's the End of the Line community update , which will accompany the full release of James McVinnie's upcoming Source Filmmaker animation.

All of which are possible avenues for this update to take, but none of which explains why Reddit is so bothered about bread . Bread was added into TF2 last week. There are currently nine different types in the game, all of which have a small chance of popping out of a Teleporter seconds after it's used.

Currently, then, there are no obvious answers, other than that TF2 continues to be a weird game. One additional point, though: if the update is due later this week, it'll coincide with the predicted date of the Steam Summer Sale.